Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (14 page)

Perhaps your personal system is based more in worry, whether over job performance, job security, or financial insecurities. Whatever the content of the worries, the real issue is the addiction to worry itself; more to the point, it’s the addiction to maintaining the
self
. In all these examples, the practice is the same. First, we have to see clearly our specific habitual patterns. Second, we have to see the pictures and beliefs from which we’re living. And third, we have to let ourselves experience the fears out of which all these beliefs and behaviors arise. When we start using our work environment in this way—using our emotional upheavals to help us dismantle our self-identity (who we think we are)—we can move from being caught in the chaos of the workplace to using that same chaos as our vehicle to become free.

There is also the issue of burnout. In burnout not only have we lost our motivation to work, but we’ve also become cynical and negative about ever finding satisfaction in what we’re doing. In living the practice life, the first step in dealing with
burnout is an increased awareness of what
we’ve
brought to the job. In other words, instead of focusing on the shortcomings of our job situation or the people we work with, we look at ourselves. For example, we can firmly believe that “I can’t do the kind of job that I was trained for” or “I’m just going through the motions.” These thoughts may even be true. However, a strong emotional reaction to our situation—be it frustration, anger, or cynicism—is a clear indicator that we need to move away from blame and focus on what we ourselves have brought to the job. What are our expectations and requirements? Where are we attached to the results of our actions? Where do we think we can control results, make things right, change people? Seeing ourselves as the one who can get things done or becoming attached to the results of what we do will surely lead to the frustration and disappointment of burnout, because we simply can’t legislate how things will turn out.

In the meantime we’re missing the key issue: our attachment to results is almost always based on the need to bolster a particular self-image or to avoid experiencing the fear of failure or the fear of being no one. Sooner or later we will have to deal with the groundlessness that comes when our false sense of security is challenged or removed. Sooner or later we’ll have to go to the roots of the fears and beliefs that tell us, in one way or another, that we’re not quite good enough and never will be.

Practicing with burnout means we have to come to know our motives, our expectations, our agendas—all the basic belief systems that run our lives. It requires us to wake up to all our restricting pictures and identities. It also requires that we learn to face and experience the fears that have been running us. But facing these fears need not be a dark or grim task. Within the wider container of awareness practice, we can experience these fears with an increasing sense of lightness and spaciousness. We can learn that burnout, like all our endless suffering, is always optional. From a practice perspective, nothing could be more fertile than burnout.

I don’t mean to imply that all the difficulties we encounter at work are self-induced. There are certainly real challenges that have to be addressed. But our emotional reactions to these challenges are our own. Furthermore, when we stay stuck in our reactions, we are less able to deal clearly with the real challenges of our work. As long as we are attached to achieving a particular result or to being seen in a particular way, that attachment will obstruct our ability to do our job wholeheartedly. It will also get in the way of experiencing the satisfaction that is possible when we simply do our best. The more we can bring practice to our work, and thereby see through our requirements of how things should be, the more we will be able to live in a genuine way, free from the compulsions of mindlessness and fear.

PART III

awakening the heart of compassion

13

Hard and Soft

T
HE STORY OF THE
Z
EN MONK
who cuts off his arm to prove his determination to practice and the image of the Buddha’s inscrutable smile point to a delicate interplay in living the practice life. On the one hand, we make disciplined efforts, and on the other hand, we just let be. Often we get confused by this distinction; and because we are prone to black-or-white thinking, we imagine that practice must be one way or the other. Either we see how important discipline is and exert strong effort, or we realize the necessity to refrain from grasping, from trying to get somewhere special, and consequently soften our approach, just letting things be.

For example, the essence of sitting meditation is simply to be here, to bring full awareness to this very moment. But what actually goes on is the incessant outpouring of our overactive brain—planning, fantasizing, conversing, worrying, and so on. In order not to get hooked by each passing thought, we learn the discipline of coming back again and again, moment after moment, to awareness of the breath, the body, the environment. We also learn the disciplined precision of labeling our thoughts, so we can know with clarity what we’re thinking while simultaneously breaking the identification with our thoughts. As we see them more and more clearly as just thoughts, we believe in them less and less as “the Truth.”

Discipline, or hard effort, is also necessary to stay with practice through all the inevitable ups and downs. At every
moment have a choice: to live the practice life or go for what makes us feel comfortable and secure. In practice we learn the value of making the effort to turn away from comfort or predictability, even when we would like nothing more than to give up on this seemingly hopeless effort to awaken.

Discipline is so important that it’s easy to get lost in a picture of practice as some stoic, almost militant enterprise. At times we hold the belief that unless we maintain our discipline, we will fall apart; we might even lose our identity as a serious and spiritual person. So we continue to struggle against those parts of ourselves that we think will undermine our practice. Yet in buckling down, we fall into the pattern of relentless self-judgment, of believing thoughts about how practice should be, about how
I
should be.

Then perhaps we get some insight into what we’re doing and move to the other end of the continuum. We remember the teaching that everything is fine just as it is; that within the passing show there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be. So we drop the discipline and try to relax into what is. We try to just let things be. But in trying to soften, we are going as much off course as in being militant in our effort. Just because everything is in fact fine just as it is does not necessarily mean that we
experience
everything as fine just as it is. To pretend that we do is a cosmetic overlay. It bypasses the necessity of putting effort into the task of clarifying our own messy life.

The interplay between hard and soft is the essence of practice. Without learning what it means to interweave the hard and the soft, we restrict our practice in such a way that it is never complete or satisfying, because it narrows the flow of our natural being to just one stream.

The interplay between hard and soft is difficult to explain. We need to experience it in order to understand what it is. It boils down to learning that
within
the discipline of choosing to be here at each moment, we realize that whenever we do spin off, especially into areas of ourselves that we don’t like—confusion,
anxiety, discouragement—we can foster a sense of spaciousness, compassion, and kindness toward the whole struggle. Instead of being caught in a narrow and dark tunnel vision of who we think we are, with all its heaviness and seriousness, we learn what it means to see our “stuff” as simply conditioning, as just ancient wounds and core beliefs.

When we find ourselves spinning off into the mental realm, our usual pattern is to heap on layers of believed judgment and self-judgment: “This is too difficult,” “I can’t do this,” “I’m hopeless.” These layers only thicken the callous shell around the heart. Cultivating a sense of space allows us to stop the “hard” approach of struggling against ourselves by pushing away our stuff as bad or as an illusion. Softening allows our inherent compassion and kindness to emerge, which, in turn, allows us to be with whatever arises. It doesn’t mean that we like it, but that we can relate to it in a new way.

Our drama, pain, and suffering sometimes feel like death itself. One of the lessons of the practice life is that this heaviness is really no more than a combination of deeply believed thoughts and fairly intense physical sensations. This
experiential
understanding is what gives us the spaciousness to let our pain just be there, as unpleasant as it may be. We still need to work with it; we can’t just label it as empty and pretend to let it go. That wouldn’t be genuine. But we can learn to approach it with a certain lightness of heart. Learning to do this is what transforms and softens our
will
—as ego, as striving, as struggle—into
willingness
.

Take the example of sitting with pain. What type of effort do we need to work with physical pain when the ankles hurt, the knees hurt, the back hurts, or we ache all over? Maybe it is necessary sometimes to grit our way through with a hard effort. But we can also gradually learn about the soft effort of just being here with the body, no longer feeling identified as just a body or just the pain. As we use hard effort—discipline and precision—to stop believing in the thoughts “This is too painful”
and “I can’t take this anymore,” our humorless self-centered identifications lighten up. This doesn’t mean we like the pain; it simply means we stop struggling against the pain and against ourselves. We learn that we can even willingly be here with the unpleasant sensations. What evolves in the process of seeing through our believed thoughts is a receptivity to what is. This is the soft effort.

This process of interweaving hard and soft effort is particularly important in working with addictions. Of course, the first stage in working with an addiction is to become aware of the addictive behavior and also of the extent to which we are being run by the addictive urges. The main effort in this stage is to apply clarity and precision of awareness to what is actually going on. It is here that the discipline of self-observation is key. How else will we see the aspects of ourselves that we would prefer to ignore or deny? As long as we don’t acknowledge our addictions for what they are, we can’t work with them.

Once we are clear about what is going on, the second stage in working with addictions is to try to refrain from the addictive behavior. This type of discipline is what we are calling a hard effort, but soft effort also is necessary. The soft effort is what will keep us from getting lost in the tunnel vision of negative self-judgment. When we struggle with addiction, it’s almost certain that we will buy into the belief that our addiction is bad or that we’re bad because we have it. This grafted-on layer of heaviness and gloom makes our attempts to refrain from the addictive behavior even more difficult than they already are. For the discipline to be effective, we must soften the harshness of our self-judgment.

The third stage in working with addictions is to experience the urges out of which our addictive behaviors arise. This requires the hard effort of
What is it?
mind, in which we focus the laser beam of awareness on the physical reality of the moment. Once we experience the addictive urge, we can enlist the softer quality and just let it be. It can be particularly helpful
to feel the quality of the craving on the inbreath. There’s something about experiencing our cravings on the inbreath that allows them to soften.

The last stage of working with addictions is to experience the suppressed pain under the addictive urge. Again, this requires the hard effort of
What is it?
mind as well as the softer effort of just letting the feelings be, without getting caught in self-judgments. At this stage it is very important to be able to bring a sense of space and kindness to practice. Otherwise, we continue in the potentially endless struggle against ourselves, in which it is so easy to sink into believed thoughts of shame, self-hatred, and hopelessness. In remembering to bring an artful, lighthearted touch to the struggle, we can balance our efforts in such a way that even our most entrenched patterns seem workable. Even in our most claustrophobic moments, all we have to do is take a few breaths into the heartspace to discover a spaciousness big enough to include everything—our most seemingly solid fears and our harshest self-judgments. Of course, we need to practice with each of these stages over and over.

Here is another example of soft effort. When my immune system disorder flares up, I feel very weak and nauseous. Even though most of the time it’s relatively OK, sometimes it comes on so intensely and fast that my first response—despite years of practicing with it—is to want it to just go away.

During a particularly strong flare-up, when I was lying in bed in the middle of the night with unrelenting nausea, I saw myself relating to the symptoms almost as the enemy. But from labeling the fear-based thoughts and being able to see through them, something clicked, and I realized the depth of my misunderstanding. Although I can try to push away my experience, the fact remains that whatever is happening right now is my genuine life. Like it or not, want it or not, this life is what is. To embrace it rather than push it away is the key to freedom. Understanding this allowed me to experience, once again, what it means to soften into the whole struggle, to cease resistance
to what is. With this understanding I became willing to affirm that I was on board. Regardless of whether I liked the trip, I would take the ride to see what it was like and where it was going, without the extra baggage of self-pity and fear. Self-pity, fear, the complaints—all the judgments—are the real obstacles to softening and surrendering to what is.